


The Egyptology Club for Non-Majors and Face Thieves

by killdoll



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh!
Genre: 'WHAT IS THIS FEELING IN MY CHEST??????', Aged-Up Character(s), Alternate Universe - College/University, Childhood Friends, Drabble Collection, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Mutual Pining, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Slow Burn, not explicit yet but it's Going to be, not quite as angsty as the summary makes it sound
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-05
Updated: 2018-08-13
Packaged: 2019-06-22 08:57:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15578304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/killdoll/pseuds/killdoll
Summary: "They say if we die together, we'll be reincarnated as twins," Yuugi says."I don't want us to be twins," says Atemu. "I want to be alive, here, with you."◯◯◯A series of interconnected drabbles and short stories set in a university AU. Puzzleshipping.





	1. meeting of the young boys

**Author's Note:**

> Been rewatching DM. I wanted to write a cutesy AU where the boys (TM) end up happy together. Let's do this.
> 
> There'll be pining on the way. Oh, and porn! There will definitely be porn. At some point. Also, I have no idea if these drabbles are going to end up in chronological order or not, so there's that.

Yuugi Mutou and Atemu El-Sayed attended the same kindergarten.

During recess on the first day, a bigger boy— six years old, cowlick, already missing a front tooth, you get the picture— accosted Yuugi under the jungle gym for his Juicy Juice.

Atemu was sitting on top of the jungle gym gazing out over the playground with the weary malaise of an aged king surveying his sovereignty. He heard Yuugi’s weak, pure “hey”, looked down, assessed the situation, decided that it was not fair, dropped down from the monkey bars like a mercenary, and rabbit punched the motherfucker.

That night, Yuugi Mutou went home and told his grandfather, eyes sparkling, “Jiji, today I met a boy with my face.”

They had not been apart since.

The next day, Atemu began teaching Yuugi how to play chess.


	2. the chess education of yuugi mutou

Yuugi couldn’t have asked for a better teacher.

Atemu was a textbook chess prodigy with an offense like a paring knife. He picked the game up at the age of four from a glass set his father kept in his home office; by eight, he was the U10 World Champion. 

Yuugi could never beat him— but he was the only person to ever offer Atemu a challenge. He didn’t go to tournaments— although he probably would’ve won them— and in fact didn’t really play chess with anyone but Atemu. 

Playing against people who weren’t Atemu just wasn’t as fun. What was the point?

The day Atemu learned he’d been awarded the title of Grandmaster, he hadn’t touched a chessboard in weeks. He had just turned twelve.

After that, most of Atemu’s energy came to be directed toward his main passion— politics— but he still considered chess a stimulating diversion, not to mention an old way of bonding with his best friend. 

(Having exhausted all competition at the practical level, Atemu found himself, later on, turning more and more toward theory. The world-famous El-Sayed Trap, which he dreamed up one summer while bored and won the last tournament he ever attended with, is still considered one of the most brilliant plays ever made.)


	3. white photo

“You know there’s a site in Egypt just filled with mummies of cats,” Yuugi announced, not looking up from the book he was reading.

It was The Scene of their second, eternal, September at Duelsley; rain had rolled in over the campus, thick dark clouds turning the world outside cornflower blue, and the outside was drenched and cold, but in Yuugi and Atemu’s dorm it was all burgundy bedding and bright yellow lamplight. Yuugi’s glossy posters and magazine cutouts gleamed in it.

Atemu— studying— tapped the eraser side of his pencil against the margin of his textbook. 

“Per-Bast. Bubastis. The cult center of Bast. It’s just ruins now,” said Yuugi. “All these bodies were left.”

“You are obsessed with Bast,” said Atemu, doing his damndest to appear stern. Too bad he couldn’t hide the amused smirk. Yuugi was obsessed with things. It was how Yuugi was. 

Atemu looked over his shoulder just enough to peer at him over his reading glasses. 

Yuugi rolled over on the bed so he was staring up at the ceiling. Kurt Cobain’s blurry face, shiny under a layer of photographic inks, stared down at him. “Not obsessed with Bast  _ per se _ ,” Yuugi said. “Obsessed with Bastet and Sekhmet. Their duality. Protection, plagues, housecats, lions, childbirth, war. That interplay of light and dark.” He popped his gum. “I’m drawn to it.”

“You’ve never been a proponent of chiaroscuro,” said Atemu, turning away from his desk and leaning on the back of his chair. “You’re into darkness, no qualifications.”

Yuugi propped himself up on his elbows to meet Atemu’s eyes. He was wearing a choker and a t-shirt that was too big for him. The way he looked made Atemu want to drag his eyes along the line of his clavicle, bare and white as a wishbone. He did not do this. 

“I guess it’s the way they complete each other,” Yuugi said. Smiling. “The yin and yang.”

“You’re so sentimental,” Atemu murmured. 


	4. on the club's genesis

Ryou Bakura was a fellow student in one of Yuugi’s classes and played a cleric in the campaign the school D&D club was running. He was Kraft macaroni and cheese and empty sky, loose white feathers and big sweaters and untrimmed fingernails and a slow, creaky whisper of a voice. He seemed like the kind of person to have a mobile of paper cranes or a piece of roadkill in his room. He creeped most people out, and Yuugi liked him. He lived in Osiris Hall too, a floor above Yuugi and Atemu. At 3 A. M. if Atemu was out cold but Yuugi couldn’t sleep, he could almost always find Ryou in pajamas and sock feet using the coffee maker in the third floor lounge, rubbing his right toe against his left ankle and staring off into space like the boy oracle of Delphi. Then they usually got up to talking about the occult.

Yuugi stumbled into the lounge and collapsed headfirst into the dilapidated sofa. He was rewarded with a face full of moldering smell and before he knew it was on all fours gagging, finally breaking Ryou out of his eternal daze.

“Yuugi! Are you alright?” Ryou was by his side in an instant, and Yuugi gagged, coughed, looked up.

“Ryou,” said Yuugi, “let’s start a club!”


	5. glow like a coil

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First short story! And some dependency, on the Puzzleshipping side
> 
> No proofreaders we blindpost like men

The Egyptology Club for Non-Majors, headed by Yuugi, with Atemu as vice president and Ryou Bakura as treasurer, is not in fact a real club at all, inasmuch as real clubs at Duelsley are approved by the student leadership committee and sponsored by a member of the faculty. They couldn’t scrape together enough club members, and then there was Yuugi’s casual propensity to refer to the group as a cult. The club meets illegally in a shed which holds extra supplies for the university’s tennis team. No one really uses it, and the club members have taken advantage of the fact to chalk arcane symbols, notes from their lessons on hieroglyphics, and obscure doodles on the wooden walls and floor. The satisfaction of pseudo-trespassing and vandalism is heady to a gaggle of straitlaced rich kids; Yuugi feels very punk. At first Atemu was not very into the whole rule-breaking aspect, but Yuugi held his hand and asked sweetly and suddenly he was willing to be a lot more rebellious.

“Alright, today we’re researching spells,” Yuugi says, heaving a dusty tome up onto a crate, making all the tennis balls inside it rattle. “We want to stop the guy who’s been harassing Ryou from, you know, doing that. We’ve tried talking to him and it didn’t work.”

“And he stole my face,” says Ryou.

“Right,” says Yuugi. “And he stole his face, also.” The book he has open contains fragmentary translations from the fragments of an ancient papyrus of spells, a demotic Egyptian grimoire. They’ll be searching it today for clues toward ridding themselves of Bakura— not Ryou, but Bakura Salib, the scourge of their recent meetings. And all of Yuugi and Ryou’s hangout times. Which are scarce, because Yuugi rarely hangs out with anyone but Atemu, and then usually only because Atemu is unavailable. But. Whatever.

“Alright!” says Jounouchi, acting pumped but very visibly trembling. “Let’s do this!”

The door opens and a girl with very long, deer-like legs walks in. She is wearing an unsettling bracelet. The three virgins squatting on the floor turn to look at her, their blank gazes like lanternfish in the dim light. They blink almost in unison. The effect is uncanny.

“Is this the dance studio?” asks the girl.

“No, but you seem extremely lost,” says Ryou.

Yuugi stands up and smiles at her. “Hi, sorry about my friend, here, he’s almost as socially awkward as I am. You’ve just stumbled upon our club meeting.”

“We were practicing arcane rituals. Now that you’ve seen us, we have to kill you,” says Ryou. He smiles beatifically.

“What’s your name?” asks Atemu. He’s sitting on a stack of boxes in the back of the room. As usual, he has no indoor voice, and commands all attention without any effort at all.

The girl blinks, overwhelmed by the influx of bizarre attention. “Anzu,” she says. “Anzu Mazaki.”

Yuugi, Atemu, Jounouchi, and Ryou all look at each other. In this instant, they all have the same thought: if they could get this girl to join their group, their number would total five, and they would finally be able to petition to become an actual club.

Yuugi goes right for it. In the room of his heart, Ryou smacks his forehead. “Anzu Mazaki, would you like to become a member of the Egyptology Club?”

“I have to practice. Dance,” says Anzu. “But—” And this prior to everyone’s expectations, waiting with bated breath, “what’s your name?”

“Yuugi. Yuugi Mutou,” Yuugi replies.

Anzu smiles at him. “I hope I see you around, Yuugi.” Then she glances at her phone, squeaks, and runs off. The door swings shut behind her.

“We scared her away,” says Ryou.

Yuugi sighs and put his face in his hands. “Actually, guys? Can I take ten?”

“Sure,” say Jounouchi and Ryou together. Atemu is silent, his eyes on Yuugi.

“Thanks,” Yuugi says. He grabs his clear umbrella from where it was leaning against the wall and practically runs outside.

The rain is coming down like a monologue. Yuugi squelches through the muddy grass to the edge of the tennis court and stands in front of the cyclone fence. It’s cold, and he doesn’t really want to be out here, but his anxiety is eating him like an army of ants, and he couldn’t stand being in that dusty shed for a minute longer.

If someone could explain to Yuugi what the hell he was supposed to be doing, he thought, that would be great. He doesn’t belong at this school. He isn’t smart enough, he isn’t hardworking enough. Disciplined geniuses like Atemu belong at Duelsley, not people like Yuugi; he just rode in on Atemu’s coattails because he was terrified by the prospect of being without his best friend. When he and Atemu returned to the room they share tonight, Yuugi would drown in a sea of unfinished homework far beyond his skill level, and yet here he was in a sports shed looking up ancient Egyptian spells.

“Partner.”

It’s Atemu’s voice, of course. A signal home. Yuugi should have expected. He turns around, sees his partner standing in the rain getting drenched. Of course; they’d walked to the shed together under the same umbrella Yuugi was holding, talking about the new Duel Monsters rules and laughing. Atemu has nothing to cover him. He’s doing his best to look stoic and composed despite the rain— and succeeding, somehow, which amazes Yuugi— but he can’t be comfortable.

“Get under here,” says Yuugi. Atemu joins him under the umbrella, shaking out his hair. “Look at you,” Yuugi fusses, tugging at Atemu’s damp shirt sleeve. “Now we have to get you home and change.”

“What’s wrong, Partner?” Atemu asks. Yuugi bites his lip. Atemu’s eyes are strong and searching, and he won’t let Yuugi break his gaze.

“I don’t think I’m supposed to be here,” Yuugi says.

Atemu frowns. “What do you mean?”

“I mean I’m not smart enough to go to this school,” Yuugi says, finally managing to look away from Atemu, and leaning against the cyclone fence. “I mean I have no idea what I’m doing. I mean I’m way behind and have no idea how I’m going to catch up, and I barely understand anything we go over in class. Ever.”

“Partner, you have just as much a right to be at Duelsley as anyone else who applied and was accepted,” says Atemu. Raising an eyebrow, he adds, “arguably more, given that you’re here through a scholarship while some of us are only here because we have trust funds.”

“Other Me,” says Yuugi, harshly. Like “Partner”, it’s something he’s called Atemu for a long time. It dates back from the early days of their friendship, when something about each of them reminded people so much of the other that they were frequently mistaken for each other, despite their different ethnic backgrounds. The reproachful tone Yuugi takes makes Atemu blink. “You’re not here because you have a trust fund. You’re here because you’re amazing and I’m... I’m not.”

Atemu sighs. “Partner. You’ve more than earned your way here. And you may complain about how behind you are, but your grades are still good. I’ve seen them. If you need help catching up, I can always—”

“That’s the thing, though,” Yuugi says. “I don’t want to keep relying on you. I want to be able to do things by myself. I’m always a burden to you.”

“Never a burden, Partner,” is all Atemu says. Yuugi can’t look at him. A moment passes, and then Atemu tenderly tucks a lock of Yuugi’s hair, made frizzy by the humidity, behind his ear, and Yuugi’s heart does something strange at that, skips a beat and trips over itself.

“I think it’s time for us to go back and knock out some homework. What do you say?”

“Yeah,” Yuugi agrees, voice hoarse. “I’ll tell Ryou and Jounouchi.”

“We’ll go back together,” Atemu says. “We’ll tell them together.”

The way they do everything.

“Come on,” Yuugi says.

*

Yuugi and Atemu come back into the shed.

“Yuugi!” says Ryou. He has the ancient spellbook open on his lap. There is a Jounouchi-shaped space where Jounouchi should be. “I just got to the part in here about execration rituals.”

“That’s cool,” Yuugi says. “Where’s Jounouchi?”

“He said something about needing to use the bathroom, but he took all his stuff,” says Ryou. He looks from Yuugi to Atemu and closes his book, able to see that club activities are over. “Should we go home?”

“Yeah,” Yuugi says. “Atemu and I were thinking about heading back early and getting some homework done. Is that okay?” 

Ryou nods, tucking the heavy volume back into its hiding space, a crevice between the wall and one of the crates. He sits back on his haunches, looking back at Atemu and Yuugi, who are getting ready to leave. “Oh— Yuugi?” he says, after a moment of worrying his lip.

“Yes?”

“You’re... holding Atemu’s hand,” says Ryou. “In— in case you didn’t realize.”

Yuugi’s cheeks glow like a hotplate coil. 

“Thank you, Ryou.”

Exit.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! [Follow me on Tumblr](https://spinzaku.sadayuki.jp/) if you like for more Yu-Gi-Oh! shit!!


End file.
